Microsoft principal software engineer, Raymond Chen has flagged as harmful to computers Janet Jackson’s 1989 pop hit ‘Rhythm Nation’
The hit track is said to contain a frequency that is dangerous to system.
Raymond Chen, who said unnamed colleague discovered the harm Jackson’s song have on computers and laptops around the same vicinity.
Chen said this in a blog post, stating that when playing ‘Rhythm Nation’ on certain computers or laptops, they could crash, while computers and laptops nearby could also crash due to the frequency in the sound despite not playing the song.
“A colleague of mine shared a story from Windows XP product support. A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s ‘Rhythm Nation’ would crash certain models of laptops. I would not have wanted to be in the laboratory that they must have set up to investigate this problem. Not an artistic judgement.”
“One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video also crashed some of their competitors’ laptops. And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video!” he added.
Explaining further, Chen said, “It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used.
“The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback.”
He added that, “And I’m sure they put a digital version of a “Do not remove” sticker on that audio filter. Though I’m worried that in the many years since the workaround was added, nobody remembers why it’s there. Hopefully, their laptops are not still carrying this audio filter to protect against damage to a model of hard drive they are no longer using,” he said.
